Common Market Local Food Hub: Connecting rural and urban communities to improve public health

When Tatiana Garcia-Granados and Haile Johnston moved to Strawberry Mansion in 2002, looking for a place where they could raise their family, they asked themselves a simple question: “How do we make it so that the kids in our neighborhood will grow up to live healthy lives?”

Garcia-Granados and Johnston zeroed in on the lack of access to fresh, nutritious food as one of the principle causes of the health challenges facing their community. At the same time, they came to understand that many small and mid-sized family farms in their immediate region struggled to survive.  For small farms, market consolidation has resulted in limited options for distribution and challenges accessing local markets to sell their products. Over time, the connection between Philadelphia’s regional rural growers and urban consumers has weakened and, in spite of the abundant productivity of nearby farms, healthy and high quality food is not reaching many of the city’s communities.

They considered establishing a farmers market in their neighborhood, but they realized the need was even greater than could be addressed by neighborhood-based projects like farmers markets, buyers clubs or community gardens alone. They broadened their thinking to the systems level, opening up more questions: “How do communities like Strawberry Mansion get their food? How did the relationships that previously existed between low-income, minority communities and local farmers go away and what could we do to rebuild them? How do we get good food into our neighborhood and others like it efficiently, affordably and ethically?

The challenges facing communities and the region’s small farmers were two sides of the same coin:

• Underserved, low-income communities lacked access to good food
• Small and mid-sized regional farms lacked access to local markets